Oliver 88 Diesel Starts Hard Pull Starts Easy

My younger brother and I picked up a really rough farm fresh 1949 Oliver 88 on the 8th of October of 2012. We plan on completely restoring it, and this will be the thread which shows all of our work and restoration pictures. There is not a lot of information online about Oliver tractors, so we would like to add what we are learning about them to this board.

Here is our story:
My younger brother Thomas has wanted a Farmall H or M tractor for years, but after chasing a bunch of ads down and traveling through New England to look at them, we found that everyone wanted a large sum of money for their tractors regardless of there condition. For two years we continued our search, and ended up finding nothing in our budget (Free to $500). To put things into perspective, my brother is 16 now and I am 23. Every seller seemed to want at least 2x scrap value for their tractors, and at $1000 minimum there was just nothing in it for us. We enjoy rebuilding and fixing machinery, and have always wanted a farm tractor. Tired and somewhat defeated, we sat down and said you know what Huntington used to be an old farming community 50 years ago, there must be some tractors around somewhere. One day my younger brother had the idea of, why cant we just use Google Earth to find them. So that is what he did. For weeks he search around our area looking for tractors. One day he said, you know there are some green squares out in this field if you turn the time slider back to 1994. We tracked the area down, and found a field completely overgrown with trees and brush. We at first did not know how to get close enough to the site as we would have to go through someones backyard to get there, but we soon found a way in. After pushing our way through what felt like a quarter mile of brush we saw some buckets in the air on top of some tall exhaust mufflers. We pushed our way through and came across a honey-hole of tractors. Who ever owned the property had 6 Ford 8/9N's a Same Diesel, a Farmall 140, two smaller White's and four Olivers. At the time we had never seen an Oliver or this many tractors before in one spot. We took some photographs and decided that these were the ones for us. Judging by the amount of brush and thickness of trees growing through the tractors, we figured nobody had seen these tractors in at least a decade. Over the next few weeks we found the owner of the tractors. We started to talk to him about the tractors we saw in the field, and he said, I do not have any tractors. When we showed him the pictures of what we found, he said he thought that they got rid of those years ago. He told us that the farm used to be 880 acres of land. Sometime in the 60's a real estate investor and the town bought 850 acres of his land and split it up into a nature preserve and a housing development. The farm shrunk to just 30 acres and they began to specialize in wholesale plants for large commercial stores. His son overhead our conversation and questioned us why we were on the property. We came prepared with a binder full of our restoration works from our International Cub Cadets, Howard Rotavators, small engines, chainsaws, you name it. The father and son were shocked to see two young guys interested in this type of old machinery. John and his father Paul asked if they could come by to see our vintage machinery and they loved everything they saw. After a little show and tell, they decided that they were going to donate one of their tractors for us to restore. They wanted to see it come back to life. They told us of an Oliver 77 out in the field. Sure enough we found it. We spent weeks dragging batteries, fuel, tools and supplies into the field in an attempt to get it running. I would say that it took us just about 2 months and $125 of parts to rebuild the carburetor, distributor, flush the fuel tank, change the oil and put a new fuel filter on it. After a bit of wiring we had it running. We drove the tractor out of the brush and onto the dirt path a hundred or so feet away they drive their pay-loaders through. We drove the 1955 Oliver Super 77 to the front and showed John and his father what we found. To our surprise, they were shocked and in a state of despair. They said, boy I cannot remember the last time I heard that tractor run. BUT, that is not the Oliver tractor we are going to give to you. He said that they put nearly $7000 into restoring that one back in the 70's. John said, there is a bunch of tractors all together back there and one which is further away past the creek. That is the Oliver we are giving to you. At first we were like, what, there are more tractors??? We ended up finding this other tractor, what turned out to be our new 1949 Oliver 88 tractor. It was sitting on 3 flat tires, and had an 8" wide tree on top of it. The engine was seized and it was missing its fair amount of parts. John and his father paid us what we had into fixing his 1955 Oliver Super 77, and even hauled our new 1949 Oliver 88 out of the field with his huge Komatsu loader. Out of its element, it looked really rough, but when he said we could have it for free, we were completely shocked. John said that his father parked that tractor back in the 60's because it had some problem and it was never used since. At this time, it was around September 15th, a few weeks after school had started. My younger brother was at school, and I had just finished college in May. I went to the farm most days and worked on it. My task was to get the engine "free" as in unseized so that we could use the starter motor and a ratchet to move the tractor onto a trailer to get it home. The first day I put a 3/4" drive ratchet on the front crankshaft nut and out some pressure on it. Nothing, not even a bit of movement. I put a 5' bar on the ratchet, nothing. A 10' bar and my 200lbs of weight hanging from it, and nothing. I realized that I was in for a bit of a job to get it free'ed up again. I pulled the 6 sparkplugs and filled the cylinders with gasoline. I let the gasoline sit for 3-5 days or so. After I siphoned the gas out of the cylinders I looked in the oil pan, nothing, not a trace of fuel. I put the bar on, and again nothing, the engine was still stuck. I went and picked up 2 gallons of Kerosene which I poured into the cylinders and let it sit for a few days. Every third day or so I would come by and bang the sides of the block with a rubber mallet to help aid in the oils penetration. After 2 weeks or so I tried the bar again, and nothing it was still stuck. Finally, I removed the kerosene from the cylinders, this time filling each cylinder with a can of PBlaster. It was an expensive proposition, but that $40 of PBlaster had that engine spinning smooth in just 3 days of penetration. It must have seeped down the walls of the cylinder, cause when I went to try it, I put some weight on my 3' ratchet and it moved about 20 degrees. I was like YESSSS its free!! I stuck my propane torch into the spark plug holes and heated the PBlaster up as hot as I could get it. I sprayed some more PBlaster in and it took. The heat drew the oil deeper and in just a few hours the engine was spinning 360 degrees. Over the next few days, I spent some time figuring out how I could get it home. I figured the tractor weighs around 7000lbs and on 3 flat tires it was almost impossible to even move with a ratchet on the crankshaft outside of 1st gear. At that time I tested the starter motor, and it did a fine job moving the tractor with the 6 plugs out of it. The starter could move it decently in 1st and 2nd gear. With the tractor finally able to move, I asked one of my buddies if I could borrow his trailer he tows his jeep around with. We agreed to pick it up on Columbus Day, the 8th of October. My brother had off from school and my friend had the day off from work. We arranged this with John and his father. We chained the tractor to my moms GMC van and towed it to the front of the farm, near the road. My buddy lined up his trailer, and in about an hour we had the 4" x 12" timbers lined up and we used a lot of man effort to get the tractor on the trailer. A lot of hand over hand ratcheting to get it up the ramps. When we hit the top, we ran into the problem that the wide front was the same width as the trailers fenders, so one side of the front end had to drive up the fender. We kicked the starter motor in, and it moved it up on the trailer. We had a very long very slow drive home, but we got it on the trailer, and home safely. When we got home, we figured that our cub cadets could pull our Oliver tractor off the trailer, NOPE. We tried two tractors, and nope. Two cubs couldn't move it. We hooked the tractor up to the van and pulled it off slowly. We then used the starter motor to get it up our driveway, where we power washed our tractor to get it nice and clean. I moved my truck off the driveway, which unfortunately wasn't road legal then, and did an 8 point turn or so to get the tractor onto the grass and behind the front tree. This was at around 3PM. My dad had no idea about any of this, and we had to have the tractor on the lawn, and behind at least the front tree before he came home from work and saw it. If we could get that done, it was our tractor and it was not coming off the property!!! My dad came home from work an hour and a half later walked a few feet past the car and yelled, Christopher, Thomas, what the hell is this!!!!!! Luckily mom is completely oblivious to the things we bring home, and was like, oh you better tell Dad when he is at work so he vents there, and not here. We wanted a surprise and he had one that day when he came home from work. It was a huge effort to get this tractor home. It wasn't the Farmall my brother wanted, but it is a farm tractor, and a huge awesome, and somewhat rare one at that. Over the next few weeks my brothers Farmall sweatshirts seemed to change from "Crops are Green and Tractors are Red" to "Oliver, the right type of Green"!!!!

That is our story, and how we picked up a 1949 Oliver 88 farm tractor for free. Please enjoy the videos and photography that we will be posting over the next year or two as we thoroughly rebuild and restore this tractor.